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SunSeeker

SunSeeker's Journal
SunSeeker's Journal
June 24, 2018

Switzerland goal scorers could be suspended for 'controversial gestures'



FIFA has been asked to impose two-game bans on Switzerland's Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka after the pair made a strong political statement following their goals in Friday's 2-1 victory over Serbia.

After Xhaka scored early in the second half to pull Switzerland level with a fierce left-footed strike, he put his hands together in a "flapping eagle" gesture that is a symbol of Albanian nationalism.

When Shaqiri prodded home the winner in the final minutes, he followed suit, with images of the action being beamed around the world.

The gesture, with thumbs locked together, is widely understood to imitate the two-headed eagle that is featured prominently on Albania's flag.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/worldcup/2018/06/23/world-cup-xherdan-shaqiri-granit-xhaka-gesture-switzerland-serbia/727828002/

Come on guys! We get it that you're Albanians who hate Serbia, but if you're going to play for the Swiss team, act Swiss and stay neutral! We don't need to refight the Kosovo war at the World Cup!
June 17, 2018

Study: People Are Getting Dumber

Ole Rogeberg, co-author of the study and senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway said studies conducted in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia have all demonstrated this similar downward trend.

"The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to environmental factors," Rogeburg told CNN. "It's not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It's something to do with the environment, because we're seeing the same differences within families."

He explained that these environmental factors could range from nutrition, changes in the education system, less reading and more time spent online to changes in the media environment.

Researchers analyzed the IQ scores of brothers who were born in different years and found that rather than being similar, as expected because of genetics, the brothers' IQ scores were often significantly different. The study also showed that parents with higher IQs tended to have more children. This disproved a long-believed theory known as the dysgenic fertility theory, which states that unintelligent people have more children, leading to the "dumbing down" of society

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-06-14/study-people-are-getting-dumber

June 17, 2018

Police Shoot Man Holding Knife to Woman's Throat, Killing Him and Critically Injuring Her

Responding officers repeatedly told the man to drop the knife but he did not let go of the weapon, according to Shepard, who said the police fired nonlethal rounds.

Hamilton confirmed the officers talked to the man and fired bean-bag rounds. But police felt the woman’s life was in imminent danger, so they ultimately opened fire with live ammunition, Hamilton said.

“There wasn’t an opportunity to de-escalate the situation,” Preciado said. “Whenever someone is assaulting someone with a sharp weapon … officers are forced to take action.”

The gunshots struck the man and the woman; both were hospitalized in critical condition. The man, who has not been identified, died at the hospital.

http://ktla.com/2018/06/16/police-shoot-suspect-in-van-nuys-3-people-hospitalized/

____________________________

Ok, the bean bags didn't work. So LAPD is out of pepper spray? WTF? They couldn't pepper spray this dude? With a face full of pepper spray, he would dropped the knife and grabbed his eyes. Sure she would have been pepper sprayed too, but she wouldn't be in critical condition in a hospital with bullet wounds. And the mentally disturbed suspect would still be alive, and could have been placed in treatment instead of a grave.

What the hell is going on with police training?

May 29, 2018

The hidden ways your gender affects your healthcare

Women are more likely to wait longer for a health diagnosis and to be told it’s ‘all in their heads’. That can be lethal: diagnostic errors cause 40,000-80,000 deaths in the US alone.

Brain tumours are only one example. A 2015 study revealed a longer lag time from the onset of symptoms to diagnosis in female patients in six out of 11 types of cancer. It isn’t that women wait longer to seek medical attention – the delay occurs after they’ve first visited their GP. A 2013 study concluded that more than twice as many women as men had to make more than three visits to a primary care doctor in the UK before getting referred to a specialist for suspected bladder cancer. So did nearly twice as many with renal cancer.  

Women have long been considered the typical patients with psychogenic symptoms, so it’s no wonder that they are especially likely to find their symptoms dismissed as “all in their heads”. In a 1986 study, for example, researchers looked at a group of patients with serious organic neurological disorders who’d initially been diagnosed with hysteria. They identified the characteristics that made a patient vulnerable to such a misdiagnosis. One was having a prior diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder. Another was being a woman.

But while women may truly have a higher risk, the difference in prevalence rates may be at least partly a consequence of overdiagnosis in women and underdiagnosis in men. Studies in the 1990s suggested that as many as 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression were misdiagnosed. Furthermore, depression and anxiety are themselves symptoms of other diseases, which often go unrecognised in women. And, of course, the stress of suffering from an undiagnosed – and therefore untreated – disease often takes its mental toll. As one article points out, “Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180523-how-gender-bias-affects-your-healthcare

May 5, 2018

California Is Now World's 5th Largest Economy, Surpasses UK

...
California's gross domestic product rose by $127 billion from 2016 to 2017, surpassing $2.7 trillion, the data said. Meanwhile, the UK's economic output slightly shrunk over that time when measured in U.S. dollars, due in part to exchange rate fluctuations.
...
All economic sectors except agriculture contributed to California's higher GDP, said Irena Asmundson, chief economist at the California Department of Finance. Financial services and real estate led the pack at $26 billion in growth, followed by the information sector, which includes many technology companies, at $20 billion. Manufacturing was up $10 billion.
...
California's economic output is now surpassed only by the total GDP of the United States, China, Japan and Germany. The state has 12 percent of the U.S. population but contributed 16 percent of the country's job growth between 2012 and 2017. Its share of the national economy also grew from 12.8 percent to 14.2 percent over that five-year period, according to state economists.
...
California's strong economic performance relative to other industrialized economies is driven by worker productivity, said Lee Ohanian, an economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles and director of UCLA's Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research. The United Kingdom has 25 million more people than California but now has a smaller GDP, he said. California's economic juggernaut is concentrated in coastal metropolises around San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.


https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/California-Is-Now-Worlds-5th-Largest-Economy-Surpasses-UK-481770711.html

Hey, anyone remember when we passed that tax increase in 2009 to pay for infrastructure and everyone said it would tank our faltering economy? Oh, and looks like left coast liberals are some of the most productive workers in the world!

April 5, 2018

Illinois town votes to ban assault rifles, fine violators up to $1,000 per day

The Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois voted on Monday to ban the possession, sale, and manufacture of assault weapons and large capacity magazines to "increase the public's sense of safety." What's more, CBS Chicago reports, anyone refusing to give up their banned firearm will be fined $1,000 a day until the weapon is handed over or removed from the town's limits.

The ordinance states, "The possession, manufacture and sale of assault weapons in the Village of Deerfield is not reasonably necessary to protect an individual's right of self-defense or the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia."

So, beginning June 13, banned assault weapons in Deerfield will include semiautomatic rifles with a fixed magazine and a capacity to hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition, shotguns with revolving cylinders, and conversion kits from which assault weapons can be assembled. And those are just a few of the firearm varieties banned. The list is long and includes all the following models or duplicates thereof: AK, AKM, AKS, AK-47, AK-74, ARM, MAK90, Misr, NHM 90, NHM 91, SA 85, SA 93, VEPR, AR-10, AR-15, Bushmaster XM15, Armalite M15, Olympic Arms PCR, AR70, Calico Liberty, Dragunov SVD Sniper Rifle, Dragunov SVU, Fabrique NationalFN/FAL, FN/LAR, FNC, Hi-Point Carbine, HK-91, Kel-Tec Sub Rifle, SAR-8, Sturm, Ruger Mini-14, and more.
...
The nearby suburb of Highland Park passed a similar ban in 2013, which was contested as unconstitutional by one of the city's residents and the Illinois State Rifle Association. Ultimately, however, the ordinance was upheld in court.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illinois-town-votes-to-ban-assault-rifles-fine-violators-1000-per-day/

March 27, 2018

RedState Issues Insane Correction to Article Implying David Hogg Wasn't At School During Shooting

On Monday evening, conservative site RedState ran an article that initially implied Marjory Stoneman Douglas student David Hogg — who in recent weeks has become an outspoken advocate for gun control — wasn’t actually at school the day of the tragic Parkland shooting. Within hours, the site ended up issuing two major updates to the story and striking through the original text of the article.

As originally published with the headline ‘New Video Casts Doubt on Whether David Hogg Was at School on the Day of the Shooting,’ writer Sarah Rumpf compared an interview Hogg gave to TIME Magazine to a recent CBS documentary that included an interview with Hogg. Hogg told TIME about his experience in school the day of the shooting, which included him hiding in a school closet while the massacre occurred.

Rumpf then highlighted that in the recent CBS documentary, Hogg said that on the day of the shooting, he got on his bike and rode as fast as he could to get from his house to the school, which he said was three miles. He did that so he could interview as many people as possible with his camera.

Rumpf wrote the following for the second update:
UPDATE #2: This Vox article indicates that Hogg went back to the campus area at 6 pm and did not actually enter campus, but had his camera and interviewed people across the street from campus. Here’s his quote:At 6 pm after the shooting, I took my camera, got on my bike. I rode in basically twilight. And I ride my bike three miles down winding sidewalks and find my way to the school, as I’ve done in previous years. All the while, I was making sure my camera bag didn’t rip open, because if you zip it a certain way, the camera falls out, and it would be destroyed.After reviewing all of this, it appears that the problem was that CBS included a very confusing quote without context. Hogg was on campus during the shooting and returned several hours later to interview people across the street. The original story remains below, in strikethrough. I am sorry for the error and have updated the post accordingly.

https://www.mediaite.com/online/redstate-issues-insane-correction-to-article-implying-david-hogg-wasnt-at-school-during-shooting/
__________________________________


The right wing just can't stop trying to smear these brave MSD kids. This particlar smear fell apart quickly, but not before my right wing in-laws posted breathlesly on facebook about how CBS "admitted" the "face of the Never Again movement" is a "fraud who was not even at school during the shooting."

Thought I'd post this here in case you have similar relatives...

March 24, 2018

Did the new spending bill really end the hold on gun violence research? Maybe not.

...
“I think a bigger signal that gun violence research is going to be endorsed would be if Congress puts money behind it, creates a stream of revenue for gun violence research. That would be the real signal — that it’s safe to get back in the water.”
...
That's because former President Barack Obama used similar language in a 2013 presidential memorandum issued in the wake of the 2012 Newtown shooting that directed the CDC to research the causes and prevention of gun violence. It didn’t do the trick.
...
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy & Research, believes the language concerning the Dickey Amendment may actually make gun violence research “more restrictive” by limiting its parameters.

“The new language limits spending to only research on the causes of gun violence,” Webster told NBC. “...Funding could not examine solutions, especially any solution that threatens the status quo on gun commerce and ownership.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/did-new-spending-bill-really-end-hold-gun-violence-research-n859141

March 19, 2018

California Leads U.S. Economy, Away From Trump

Whatever the president says, this state does the opposite. It's working.

That's a claim worth exploring. Look at California, which is one-eighth of the U.S. population with 39 million people and one-seventh of the nation's gross domestic product of $2.3 trillion. Far from being a mess, California's economy is bigger than ever, rivaling the U.K. as No. 5 in the world, when figures for 2016 are officially tabulated. 

California is the chief reason America is the only developed economy to achieve record GDP growth since the financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing global recession, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Much of the U.S. growth can be traced to California laws promoting clean energy, government accountability and protections for undocumented people. Governor Jerry Brown, now in his fourth term, considers immigrants a major reason for the state's success: "39 percent of us are Latino and the majority are from Mexico," he said in a March 2 interview in his Sacramento office.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-10/california-leads-u-s-economy-away-from-trump

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